


Mirrors

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst/Analysis/Questions/Theories, Character Study, Epilogue References, Gen, Hearing Voices, Mind Manipulation, Pesterquest, Pesterquest spoilers!!!!, Possession, Swearing, basically me going "what was going on?!?!?!" for several paragraphs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25169026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Gamzee doesn’t feel well.
Relationships: Gamzee Makara & Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas, but it's unrequited/not happening in this timeline, interpretation - Relationship, with possible pale
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> Or: I ramble self-indulgently about possibilities and theories and questions regarding Gamzee Makara’s Bad End Route in Pesterquest for like...... a while lol. I really hope I didn’t get anything wrong — sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made/stuff I might've messed up. I... have so many questions..... the Reader had already encountered Lil Cal by the time this Bad End route happened, so I was wondering who else Gamzee could have been talking about when he says "Don't worry, you'll meet him soon," referencing the voice telling him to kill everybody. @_@ 
> 
> Thank you!!! I hope you’ve been staying safe and doing as well as possible.

Hey, now. 

You ever feel like your soul doesn’t belong to you the way you fucking thought it did? 

Like there’s a slice down the center of your skull, and a stranger in your eyes? Like you see your face reflected back all slack-jawed and staring, and your eyes know you differently than they did last night, and the night before that, and across all your shambling lonely sweeps? There’s something angry there, and that _angry_ is you but not what you wanted to be. Like — it would’ve been hard for Gamzee Makara to put it into words just right, but his pan was getting clearer all the time. The troll looking out through his eyes was him, but a crooked half of him that had always been destined for something more. Half of Gamzee had been sopored-up and drowsing, but sort of maybe kind of possibly _alive eternally in Him_ , too... in the Angel of Double Death, in that shattering-apart of time once all the jokers have had their fucking say. Once the cards were laid out on the table, and the game of universes was all good and played, and the miracles —

And the miracles weren’t what they were supposed to be, either. But they _were_ real, and that had to matter, too. The miracles were awful in the holiest way, but a paradise planet was waiting for them all. 

The Angel of Double Death was always already there, dearly motherfucking beloved. 

And in the end, apotheosis. 

Half of Gamzee was in the motherfucking puppet, motherfucker. How did he know that? He’d never seen the Messiahs-damned thing before now, with its glossy plastic eyes and cotton guts and strangling arms. But the voice whispering to him said it was true — said so many amazing things — and even if Gamzee had tried resisting at first... even if Gamzee had scraped apart all the mirrors in his hive, trying not to look in his own eyes, _trying not to ruin things by knowing too much_... now he was starting to listen. He’d thrown his sopor pie away. He’d promised his friend he wouldn’t blur out his think pan no more, you fucking know? And if Gamzee _was_ in the puppet, maybe it was kinda funny his friend who’d watched him toss that sopor pie out the window claimed it’d looked like he’d been lifted up off the couch on puppet-strings to do it, mechanical and swinging and so uncannily wrong. _That_ was something else the voice told Gamzee: it had looked a little teeny bit like he’d been possessed — puppeted by something-or-other, haha, even if it did happen to fucking be another half of his own soul, maybe — and the brand new friend he’d been trying to entertain had shuddered listening to him speak.

Had Gamzee been in control of himself, just then? Could he remember? What exactly did it mean to be “in control,” anyway, and what would it mean to surrender to what had already come to motherfucking pass? Gamzee got all told about a time when he was carved in two... physically, that is, and not just in his soul. Half of him would be cackling and the other half caught mid-terrified-scream. Was it the screaming side, now, that was losing himself? Losing the sopor-sticky control he’d never known he had. 

Do you see, brothers and sisters, anyone who’s listening? The voice asked so many things, and Gamzee was used to an empty mansion at the edge of the sea. Gamzee was used to the silence. Except for waves, and honk-horns, and all that shit.

The voice asked, you wanna know what your friends really think about you?

The voice asked, you wanna know what the end of the world’s gonna look like?

You wanna know what you have to do, to make sure the Game goes like it’s fucking supposed to, and the Messiahs are as real as you’ve always known them to be in your heart? Gamzee was a part of the Messiahs. Rowdy and capricious minstrels; the Vast Honk to come; the furious knowing in his eyes. Maybe Gamzee saw the puppet in his own face, and that was why he smashed every mirrored surface in his hive. Juggling clubbed that shit, and pounded his head against the wall like he was trying to rattle all the voices out of it. Yeah. Maybe Gamzee’s eyes were empty blue Earth-sky plastic and that puppet’s voice was in his head. Perched over his shoulder, a cozy best friend like Gamzee’d always wanted. The puppet was a whole sloppy kaleidoscope of souls. Gamzee had never really been as alone as he’d felt.

Part of Gamzee belonged to his friends... belonged to Karkat, who checked up on him night after fucking night to make sure he hadn’t gotten his ass culled somehow... but maybe that wildly cackling part was stronger just now. Maybe Gamzee didn’t want Karkat to know him like this, to hate him, to give up on him. Maybe Gamzee told himself everything bad would be worth it, when the true story finally got itself told.

But anyway.

But anyway.

The voice. Let’s motherfucking focus up for a second, alright? 

Who was He, that true god? The voice that told Gamzee what he had to do next, who he all had to cull so that the story got told, relentless and divine? Was it the puppet, or some author in a smug green room hanging with mirrors nobody had ever managed to shatter? (Gamzee would take a righteous club to all that glass, if you gave him a motherfucking chance — or would he? Maybe the rage would pass. He was terminallyCapricious, after all.) Or maybe our voice... our narrator... our self-proclaimed savior and our damnation was the Prince of Heart, who was trying to swallow the story his own self? He changed the lines, friends and strangers, and people hanging like puppets, limp on cosmic narrative strings, would be compelled to speak ‘em. The Prince had tried keeping the puppet contained, by the fucking way. A prisoner, and yet the Prince was part of the puppet, too. A whole gulp of his fractured soul, don’t you motherfucking know it? 

Heh, yeah, _don’t you motherfucking know?_ And Gamzee’s friend was gonna meet the Prince soon enough. It was puppets all the way down.

Gamzee would have to tell his friend about that, if he ran across them doing what had to be motherfucking done: don’t worry. You’ll meet him soon enough. You’ll meet Him.

Gamzee resisted for days. But his voice changed (two halves of his soul, two Messiahs two cherubs two choices), and his eyes grew quick and painful-sharp, and he saw the holes in his own mind, in the story. In the world. In another timeline, it would’ve taken more: Gamzee would end up running out of sopor all natural like, and that chatty red-text human would feed him blasphemies... shit. And Tavros would die. In another timeline, Gamzee would fall apart after he found his friend Tavros cut in two just like him, but reverseways. He’d tell the human Dave Strider that he thought maybe the puppet-voice he heard could show him the truth about the gods, and Dave would say yeah, doing what the funny little whisper said... killing them all, yeah, it was time to mother 

FUCKING

kill

THEM

all

... sounded just about right. Welp, better go on and do it. Sounds A-okay, a solid fucking plan. 

Three slashes across Gamzee’s face, next, bubbling purple carbonated blood like the three slashes across his couch, now... only these slashes bubbled up with stuffing, same as inside a puppet. And isn’t that funny, too? Gamzee had cotton-blood his own self, in a manner of fucking speaking. Half his soul did. Half his soul always would. 

In another timeline, Gamzee would have met Karkat in person before he stood over him, the voice of the one true pen or the Prince or the puppet or all of them, _all or none of them together_ humming in his split-apart soul and gory juggling clubs in his hands. Gamzee would have fallen asleep with his head propped on Karkat’s knee, and Karkat might’ve tough-lovingly reminded him to go clean himself up sometimes when he started smelling kinda nasty. Gamzee could have loved his friends more than he knew how to say — they were the ones who were all supposed to be looking out for him, right? If Karkat told him what he wanted... what could have made them bros forever... maybe Gamzee would’ve done whatever was in his power to give it to him. He woulda wanted to, anyway.

But not in this life. Not this time. Gamzee broke all the mirrors, but there’s only so completely a troll could hide from his own motherfucking self. And anyway, this voice was good and real. The rage was coming, with Subjugglation and blood. 

This voice was the only motherfucker who’d ever bothered to tell Gamzee the truth. He didn’t feel well — 

_He didn’t feel right —_

And half of his soul belonged to the puppet, stitched together with other souls and hidden in the void, always waiting and never as far away as you’d think (both in the puppet and behind Gamzee’s own motherfucking skin holy shit holy shit _holy shit_ ) —

 _But it was the truth._ The story was a circus, and Gamzee had a part to play. 


End file.
